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We love Wink’s smarthome hub and haverecommended it highlyin the past.
What’s going on?
Is Wink done for?
Quirky began life as a startup company in 2009 with several, well, quirky but useful sounding ideas.
In 2014, Quirky partnered with GE to create a new company namedWinkto focus on internet-connected devices.
The problem centered on an expired certificate, and unfortunately, solving it required a recall of many hubs.
Flextronics, in turn, sold Wink toi.am+in mid-2017, where the company remains to this day.
Quirky did come back to life but remains separate from Wink.
Wink Development Has Slowed to a Crawl
Smarthome hubs live and die by their product integrations.
So it’s disconcerting that Wink last announced new product integrationsin September 2017.
In the last four months, all of Wink’sblog post updatesdescribed firmware updates designed to fix issues.
The last new feature, which realistically is an enhancement of Lookout, came over a year ago.
But worse than lack of updates and features, it’s almost impossible to buy a Wink Hub now.
Any attempt to add aWink productto the cart at its website led to “temporarily unavailable” errors.
This is true for many of the third-party products on the Wink website as well, likelightbulbsandsmart plugs.
Even Amazon.com and Home Depot had little, if any, Wink products available.
We reached out to Wink about this back in November 2018.
We are currently restocking our website, which should be up soon.
The Wink Hub 2 may be available at our other partnered retailers.
We asked Wink for clarification and whether the company might be working on a next-generation Wink Hub.
As for our stock, you read correctly but we are also working on our inventory as well.
So hopefully very soon our retailers, as well as our website, are fully stocked soon.
Five months later, Wink hasn’t restocked any stores—either it’s own online stores or retailers.
Home Depot doesn’t have a single listing for just the Hub either.
Amazonis in a similar state; it no longer directly stocks the Hub.
The Future Looks Bleak for Wink
Wink isn’t looking too healthy, and that’s worrying.
The company doesn’t offer any monthly subscription for the service its hubs depend on.
Instead, Wink generates revenue through hardware sales.
Looking around at i.am+ for any direction doesn’t boost confidence.
The company rarely mentions Wink, and its latest push is a new voice assistant namedOmega.
We reached to both Wink and i.am+ for comment on this story.
Neither had responded at the time of publication.
We’ll update this article if we do hear back.
If you are looking for an easy to use, simple to setup smarthome hub, we’d suggestSmartThings.
But much like Wink, the ease of use comes at some cost to advanced capabilities.
If you’re technically savvy and want advanced automations, then you may want to considerHubitat.
Hubitat is capable of automations that can potentially cut out the need for a voice assistant.
While they aren’t compatible with Z-Wave devices, Amazon supports ZigBee with its Echo Plus and Echo Show.
And you’re free to sidestep Z-Wave and ZigBee and go with Wi-FI based devices instead.
These will work directly with your voice assistant, allowing it to act as your hub.
